I follow the white vastness with my gaze, in awe. We both smile. The flower in my palm. I love the flower’s kindness, touching its tenderness to the extended palm. I recognize the same vastness in a flower as in the floating ice. I grab a nearby chair from those cast under the protective shade of trees, and sit. I am a spectator with the world expanding before me. The continuous motion is a passage through time, scattering worn leaves along the way, hurrying my own life forward. Anticipating nothing, I rest for a moment with eyes open. The red chair on dry grass, a backdrop to life, is my resting place. I will die an observer, yet every act of mirroring the world plays out wholly in myself. Every irritation belongs to me, just as every marvel charging and mounting my heart is mine alone. Life is overflowing and I am not seperate, not from flowers, nor from shelves and crests of snow and ice, not from a single breath exposed and raw in frustration or pain or love. A faint or furious chime echos life, whispers to petals soft to my touch, breaks now on the ocean’s surface. The ocean is the palm that holds the flower up to the sky, where our eyes meet and smile.